It’s hard to really understand the enormity of Vegas until you’re there. The casinos are endless sparkling castles adjoined by a maze of walkways, the replica Eiffel Tower stares down at you on the Strip, fat tourist trawl the streets with their eyeballs popping out of their heads in excitement, amazement and awe.

It fits then that the journey of two antiheroes, misfits of their generation, self-confessed freaks on a journey in search of the American dream, find themselves in Las Vegas. This is the story of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson’s most heralded work.

Raoul Duke (Thomson) has been hired by Sports Illustrated to cover the “Mint 400” which is “the richest off-the-road race for motorcycles and dune-buggies in the history of organized sport–a fantastic spectacle in honor of some fatback grossero who owns the luxurious Mint Hotel in the heart of downtown Las Vegas.”

Equipped with a red Chevy convertible and a battery of drugs and alcohol, Duke and his overweight Samoan attorney, Doctor Gonzo (Chicano activist Oscar Zeta Accosta) set off in March, 1971. They return later that month in the “White Whale” (a Cadillac convertible) and another sizable store of illicit substances, to report for Rolling Stone on the National District Attorneys Association’s Conference on Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

Almost 40 years later, the book still carries with it such bravado that the reader can’t help but have a visceral reaction to it – you either love or hate this book. The language is obscene, the content even more so and you are drawn into the drug haze of these two grotesque but loveable misfits like you have been lassoed by a cattle herder.

Thompson created a new language to describe the acid culture of the 60s and 70s with this book, but he tackled an even bigger event of that time. Fear and Loathing is a dark but humorous commentary on the death of the American dream.

Unfortunately the resonance of such a work is somewhat lost on our generation. The magnitude of the changing landscape of American politics at the time – the decline of the counter-culture movements of the 60s, the ongoing Vietnam war and of course the succession of Nixon administration, are issues that we couldn’t pick up on while reading this book. Laila Nabulsi, Producer of the film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, said Thompson was the first to acknowledge the death of hope of his generation, “It’s really amazing that in 1971 he already saw that final nail on the coffin of the sixties which is really bitter sweet.”

One of Thompson later works, Kingdom of Fear, which some critics say doesn’t even come close to the standard of his work from the 70s is a more accessible book for our generation. Published in 2003, this work is to some extent, an autobiography, but it also incorporates contemporary issues such as consumerism, obesity and the blunders of the Bush administration into the story, in a way only Thompson could. This work is worth reading even if the critics disagree.

Fear and Loathing’s triumph is of course the birth of a new way of writing, Gonzo journalism. This work was the first of Thompson’s to cement Gonzo into writing history. The blending of fact and fiction, reality and trip makes you sink deeper and deeper into the drug psychosis of the writer to the point where you don’t know whether you’ll come out unscathed.

The inclusion of illustrations by Ralph Steadman enhances the visceral Gonzo experience. With splattered ink Steadman depicts the characters of the story in a grotesquely fitting way. Thompson once said that Steadman “saw the world through illustration how he saw the world through writing.”

Gonzo has influenced many contemporary writers, in subtle and not so subtle ways. From David Sedaris who uses a distinct autobiographical style, to Charles Buckowski, who was around in the 70s and some elements of his work reflect Thompson’s. Travel writers have been the biggest group to jump on the Gonzo bandwagon, which in many ways has reinvigorated the method in which they convey their subject.

You can get the gist of Fear and Loathing by reading the first page, but why would you want to stop there? You can delve into a different life in this book, you can pretend to be hurtling down the Strip in the White Whale, you can dream of being as talented as Hunter S. Thompson, but more than anything, you can get fucked up just by reading a couple of hundred pages.

There is movement all around me but it feels like everything is in slow motion.

I feel uneasy. There is an overwhelming smell of urine.

People are talking to each other but it doesn’t sound like any type of language. I don’t look anyone in the eye. I clutch my purse.

I have walked half a block and am midway through a commentary on the sleaziness of backpacker culture when I cross over into another world.

There must be a hundred, maybe two hundred of these beings on the street.

Junkies.

The street looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in weeks, garbage is piled up on the footpath. Fortresses made from empty cans sit before boarded shop-fronts.

A man walks past me with a syringe in his hand. A prostitute falls onto the road and laughs.

There is a haze of calm and delirium. It is as though there is something in the air that everyone has breathed in, yet I remain unaffected.

Disbelief. Sadness. Terror.

They don’t want anything from me, but I feel I could be mugged or raped or beaten.

I am confronted with my own judgment; I feel the cocoon of my former life being violently ripped away.

My eyes are open.

Before I know it drunken travellers surround me once again. I wonder how many of them have taken that same wrong turn.

by Ryan McLennan, Virginia, USA

I love the feeling you get when you read status updates and realise that you are smarter, funnier and more interesting than your “friends”, I love the ego boost you get when you have ten new notifications just for that day, and nothing beats receiving comments on your own hilariously witty update, which of course is an in-joke involving only the closest of your Facebook comrades.

I have a pool of narcissism lurking within me that I like to dip my foot into occasionally (I can’t deny it, I am a blogger after all), but the question is, should I go for a 1km swim every morning including warm-up laps?

I’d like to say I use Facebook for the greater good, to share news articles and interesting video clips, well I do. However, the majority of my time is spent laughing patronisingly at certain high school friends’ photos and immaturely sharing clips of a TV show from my childhood in which one character looks remarkably like a talking vagina (the program was Plasmo if you were wondering).

This is all a lot of fun, but when this kind of fun takes over my life and I can’t function for an hour without checking for status updates, something is not quite right.  Facebook has shown me how banal life can be, how little people have to say, and how much spare time they have to do it in.

I think we need some mystery. As Jerry Seinfeld said, we need to give people a chance to miss us a little. Perhaps we should all jump out of that nasty pool and take a walk, read a book, listen to some music or have a beer. When we use Facebook , maybe we could use it as a means to comment on what interests us in the world, apart from ourselves. I’m sure there must be something right?

A study conducted  at the Cornel Medical Centre in New York City has found that participants taking Serotax and Paxil (two very common types of antidepressants) over a five week period recorded unhealthily low sperm counts. The strange thing is that initially their sperm looked normal, but on closer inspection the number of sperm cells with fragmented DNA rose from 13.8 percent to 30.3 percent after just four weeks, according to an article in New Scientist.

Fragmented DNA in sperm may not seem like a big deal if there are plenty of sperm, but IVF studies have found that where the man has sperm with damaged DNA fewer embryos form and those that do are less likely to implant successfully in the uterus.

This information is shocking to us hearing it for the first time, but apparently results of decreased fertility in males have been appearing in antidepressant research world-wide. How have we not been told about this? Well there is no concrete evidence, just a fairly significant trend that antidepressants cause decreased fertility in males, so of course drug companies are not liable to give out the information.

It will be interesting to see when this information enters the public consciousness whether it will prompt a more stringent prescription of antidepressants by doctors in future. Or, (and now I’m just being blindly hopeful) whether patients will be dissuaded from medicating and instead encouraged to find alternative means of treatment.

It looks like we’re going to stave off the end of the world for the moment. The Large Hadron Collider broke down just days after opening, and then broke down again a little over a week later according to New Scientist. It seems we are not ready to explore the ends of the universe just yet, well not until the cryogenic plumbing of the LHC is fixed, which could take until next year. It will require replacing one of the 15-metre-long, 35-tonne superconducting magnets which was damaged when the temperature increased by over 100 degrees celcius (it was suppose to be kept at a stable -271). Despite the hitch, the official inauguration is still set for October 21st.